After a long time with a lot of work I have now time for an own picture. A scene inspired by an Wallpaper, there are also plenty of children’s books about the lighthouse cat.

Although mental ray is more suitable for layering passport as for beauty shots, I have create a stress test scene with 3ds max 2011 and mental ray 3.8 with 16 million polys, Hair and the ctrl.ghost shader with progressive rendering and image based Lightning. More infos about this technique you find at www.mastering-mentalray.com or here. Except for the leafshader of the trees all materials have hand painted displacements (length 0.5 px) insteand of bumps. The HDRI is from www.openfootage.net. The new slate editor in 3ds max 2011 is very busy with such a scene. Some previews aren’t able to render.

The Cat is rigged with CAT. Hair and grass are rendered with mr prim, Ivy with Ivy, procedurally generated stones, flowers with PFlow, Rendering in 1:30h, Intel Q9550/8GB, 32 bit float, OpenEXR, and CC in FullHD Nuke.

I’ve used no geometry shader for hair due to many problems with this version of mental ray.

Hope you like it!

Many Greetz
Vali